Kunckel's father was a master glassmaker (as the family had been for a couple of centuries) and some kind of chemical analyst and alchemist in the service of duke Friederich of Holstein.
He had no university education. He was taught glassmaking and the chemistry of glassmaking by his father and other glassworkers.
He learned the `apothecary's art' in Rendsburg, and some more advanced chemistry of glass maunfacturing later in Dresden.

Very rare. Kunckel recognized the presence of sulfur in cinnabar but overlooked it as a component of other common sulfide minerals. Kunckel wrote primarily on inorgranic chemistry and he was important in the discovery of phosphorus.

Translations: Partington lists a number of translations that need to be researched.

Rare. A collected edition of the author's alchemical and chemical works compiled after his death by J.C. Engelleder, a physician who had a practice in Hamburg. It is a famous chemical handbook, perhaps the most important work in the German school of the second half of the the seventeenth century. Partington (2, 361-77) gives a bibliographical account with commentary to the many references to the discoveries contained in this book, including as it does "an interesting account of the large laboratory (`gold house') in Dresden, as big as a church, with furnaces and tall chimneys, of the old manuscripts, and of the harsh treatment of former alchemists who failed to achieve results."